Ask the Profussor – Chi-poat-a-licious
A lot can happen in 19 days. Heck, a lot can happen in just one. Tomorrow is the official grand opening of the newest Chipotle in Albany County, and dangerously it is walking distance from my house. Maybe its close proximity will silence my complaints about good food not being available at reasonable prices.
Or maybe not.
Actually, I have a lot on tap for the weeks to come. Twitter has recently been a hotbed of inspiration for me, and for the first time in a while, I feel like I really have a lot that I want to write about. There’s been plenty of stuff that I feel I should write about—I have a growing list—but for some reason or another, I just can’t make myself do it.
Anyhow, before we move into the future, I have to address the past. There are questions that have been asked and answered, but there have also been questions that were asked, only to be left hanging around searching for some resolution. Well today, they can finally rest in peace as I cross them off my to-do list and clear my conscience. I may even need to weigh in on a few of your comments from the past two and a half weeks.
You’ll just have to read on to see if something you wrote got under the profussor’s skin.
Bumping Into Bloggers
Sunday is a day for hangovers. I suppose Saturday can be too. But I didn’t drink copious amounts of booze last night. In fact I didn’t even have a drop. What I drank a lot of yesterday was coffee.
In about two hours I had two steaming mugs of Ethiopian (two different kinds), a shot of espresso, and I took a 20 ounce brewed coffee for the road.
This was all down at this amazing café in Scranton, Pennsylvania. For those who are wondering, the Wilkes Barre-Scranton DMA is in the same 51-60 bracket as Albany-Schenectady-Troy. Anyhow, I realized it would probably be a while before I made it back, so I had best try as many things as possible while I was there.
Bad idea.
My heart didn’t explode, but after arriving home I had a total caffeine crash and passed out on the sofa after dinner. When I awoke from my brief post-meal nap, I had a pounding headache, and could not even attempt to sit down in front of the computer to write today’s post.
So instead of something interesting about wine, today is a brief post about local bloggers.
Something New for the FLB
A while back CSN stores sponsored a cast iron pan giveaway on the FUSSYlittleBLOG. Overall, I thought it went pretty well. The promotion was certainly a learning experience. Apparently CSN was quite happy with how it went, and wanted to do something else on the FLB. This time we are going to do something new. Instead of a giveaway, I am going to pick something on cookware.com to review. The online store has a ton of stuff, including Corelle dinnerware, which I had never seen before, but some of their simpler styles have nice clean lines.
No, I’m not going to review plates. Rather I have my eye on something that has to do with coffee. Not espresso, not cappuccino, but simple brewed coffee. And it is part of my master plan to start drinking better coffee at home on a more regular basis.
I’ll give you a hint.
Good Eggs and Bad Eggs
A week ago it was 380 million eggs. Now it’s about 550 million eggs. It’s a mind-boggling figure.
You may be wondering where the additional 170 million eggs came from. Interestingly enough they came from another Iowa producer, Hillandale Farms of New Hampton. It seems like they are getting off easy in the media, since their modest quantity of Salmonella enteritidis-infected eggs is dwarfed by the earlier recall from Wright County Egg of Galt, Iowa.
Another reason why the recall is so large is that the infected eggs go all the back to April and span production through July and August. For those of you without fingers, that is five months of bad eggs.
Last week when the recall was significantly smaller I wondered, “What will it take to get some serious food policy discussions moving?” And I think I have the answer: a very smart lawyer. Meet Bill Marler (again).
He’s the good egg. I’ll get to the bad egg in just a minute.
Hey, I’m Eating That
If you are eating while you read this, I would strongly recommend you stop right now. Click on the RSS feed, add the FUSSYlittleBLOG to whatever blog reader you use, and come back later. Preferably, after you have digested.
Today might get a little disgusting. Maybe more than a little.
You’ve been warned
I could be wrong, but I believe that most non-human living things instinctively know what is food and what is not. That’s not to say they can’t be tricked, or that they will always make the best decisions. But there are some who believe that the first people learned what to eat by watching what foods lower animals ate and noting which berries they avoided.
That said, I watched with horror many years ago when I saw a couple of tourist children trying to feed the pigeons Nerds candy. Their parents were sitting nearby, watching the scene unfold. The birds were curious about these small brightly colored objects. They pecked around them, but refused to eat them.
Let me say that again. Pigeons refused to eat them.
Not Putting Up With It
It’s summer’s bounty. And this is the time that people are doing all kinds of great things with it. They are canning, freezing, pickling, and all other methods of preserving. They are trying to take some of the summer sunshine and put it away for the long cold winter to come, so they can pull it out when they need it most.
But not me.
Me? I’m going through orgiastic feasts of summer produce. I’m stretching the limits of what is humanly possible. My family went through more tomatoes this week than I could have ever imagined, and loved every minute of it.
Well, almost every minute of it.
Smell the Glass
Apologies in advance to Mrs. Fussy, who has dutifully agreed to wake up early on a Sunday morning to read yet another post about wood that nobody really cares about. Especially not her.
But let me try to convince you for a moment that this post is worthwhile.
One of the most difficult things to do in wine tasting, or even spirit tasting for that matter, is to distinguish the smells in the glass, and identify what they are and where they came from. Ultimately, the vast majority of wine smells like wine. Picking out nuances like cigar box, toast, or even vanilla takes a lot of work.
I was talking about this with my father-in-law on Thursday night as we tasted two different single malts side by side. It was a battle of the classics, Macallan versus Highland Park. The influence of wood on 12-year-old whiskey is significant.
Now what would you say if I told you there was an easy way to identify which smells come from wood?
Peachy
Here is another roundabout cocktail story. Somehow cocktail stories always are. As you may know, earlier this week I visited The Fresh Market, Albany’s newest gourmet grocery store.
Anyhow, there had been a discussion on the Table Hopping blog about the market earlier this week, and RobertR invoked the sacred name of Frog Hollow peaches. I had not thought about these delectable treats since I was at the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco about a year ago, but indeed they are some of the best peaches I have ever eaten.
It never even occurred to me that one could order Frog Hollow peaches online and have them shipped. They are so ripe and fragile that a cross-country trip just seems like a bad idea.
Just to twist the knife a bit further, RobertR supplied the link to order these amazing fuzzy orbs of liquid summer sunshine. Honestly, they weren’t nearly as expensive as I had thought. That is, until I calculated the recommended overnight shipping. I will pay a lot for great peaches, but eighty dollars is a pretty penny to pay for postage.
But on the Frog Hollow site I stumbled upon the availability chart. And that’s when it really hit me that we are at the height of peach season. It also explains the giant display of local peaches right at the entrance of The Fresh Market.
That can only mean one thing:
Read more…
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